Romance deals in fantasy. We may never get the meet-cute of our wildest dreams, but the fictional people we see in romantic television shows and movies get the satisfaction of awkward fumbling, blushing discomfort, and modest, unexpected flattery. While these fantasies differ in size and scope — what if a lowly Italian homemaker met a National Geographic photographer? What if your overworked assistants set you up so you’d be in a better mood? — the name of the game this year is the “age gap” romance, depicting women over 40 seduced by men who are, well, a bit younger.
Anne Hathaway fell for fake-boybander Nicholas Galitzine’s charm in The Idea of You; Nicole Kidman learned to live, laugh, and love with Zac Efron playing himself (kind of) in A Family Affair; and we had Carol Kane’s quiet flirtation and platonic romance with her former student turned cantor played by Jason Schwartzman in Between the Temples and the less-than-savory stepmom-and-stepson romance in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer. These texts play — sometimes gently, sometimes rough — with the stakes of a not-quite-forbidden but slightly taboo affair. And all ask a different version of “what if?” Now we have the worst of the bunch, which dares to ask: What if you were having a bad time at a writers’ residency in Morocco and the only person who understood you was a guy in private equity who hates his girlfriend? Whose fantasy is that?
Such is the premise of Susannah Grant’s Lonely Planet, which hit Netflix this past week. Starring Laura Dern as Katherine and Liam Hemsworth as Owen, the two find themselves bonded in cynical lonesomeness on an exclusive and selective writers’ retreat in Morocco. Katherine, like Hathaway’s Idea of You character, Solène (remember “Solène”?), is an embittered divorcée, distracted from finishing a manuscript, just like Kidman’s Brooke in A Family Affair. Though writers’ retreats deal in socialization — group dinners, literary bonding — she wants nothing to do with any of that, rebuking her fancy room and everyone else there. She’s there to get work done; isn’t anyone else?
Well, luckily there is one other person who is there to get work done, but that work is private equity and asset management. Owen shows up as the plus-one of Lily (Diana Silvers), a successful young novelist who has blown up à la Sally Rooney (whose new novel, Intermezzo, incidentally, also features an age-gap relationship). Owen is there for emotional support but also under the loosely agreed-upon compromise that he’ll be able to continue his financial wheeling and dealing, executed over vague texts that say stuff like “Is the deal happening?” This immediately annoys Lily. Doesn’t he want to play charades? Doesn’t he want to talk to writers about their books? Isn’t he going to ask how her writing is going? No — he has to make deals! And to his dismay, no one respects that. In fact, the other writers seem to dismiss private equity; have you heard of something so absurd?
That neither Katherine nor Owen is compelled to buy into the social contract of the residency is one of several reasons Lonely Planet reeks of a kind of evil not otherwise found in this year’s crop of age-gap romances. Whereas those other films had odd misgivings about their central relationships — the women often fret over how their bodies have aged, as Hathaway’s Solène compares herself to a fake boyband’s groupies and Kidman’s Brooke struggles to find a chic outfit — this film abandons any pretense of scandal regarding age (yay) so the romantic leads can instead, uh, look bored when talking to each other. They bond over what is not quite isolation or even loneliness, but a shared evasiveness and pessimism. For all that Katherine and Owen dismiss their peers, the film never clarifies what might make a writers’ retreat so isolating. Katherine is “reclusive,” bothered by the amenities offered to her, shrinking herself into smaller and smaller workplaces to get some peace of mind. This is seen as the more dignified path compared to Lily’s incessant partying and networking and dancing. For all her supposed talents, Owen’s girlfriend is rendered as an unpleasant nag, her behavior reverse-engineered so that we don’t care if Owen cheats — let alone that she also cheats with a writer we’re told wrote a “beautiful memoir about his time as a child soldier in Libya.” Not that Owen would care about that in the first place since we’re told, by him and Lily, that he doesn’t really like to read!
Lonely Planet might have worked as a satire about writers, self-serious and irritating in their quirks, if the film had a sense of humor, but Grant’s screenplay moves at a glacial pace with the same events occurring over and over. Lily will invite Owen to do something; he says no; in his exile, he always winds up back with Katherine. Their shared experiences make for classic vacation rom-com fare — car breaks down in the middle of a desert, an unexpected shopping date together — but all they talk about is how they don’t fit in. Neither feels especially keen to make the other the object of their affection; they’re just the only two who seem to get it. Not only is that un-fun to watch, but it feels generally mean-spirited: These are two characters who could only love each other as a last resort against the war on boredom.
If this type of situation is meant to be a fantasy for Dern’s Katherine, mourning her former marriage and uneasy in social situations, Owen is anything but a catch: He’s charmless, incurious, and weirdly sensitive about private equity, which he also seems to know is bad. (He briefly argues that doing private equity for “clean coal” is better than people having no electricity whatsoever, then he quits his job for no ethical reason beyond the fact that he seems to get too many texts.) As a singular fling under extenuating circumstances, their courtship is hardly buyable. When the ending of the movie approaches and he’s come back for her after six months has passed, it’s hard to imagine what’s going through either of their heads. This person? Again? Still? Neither of these characters leaves the other with much to think about, let alone love. There’s no danger or energy to their affair; the whole film is surprisingly stakes-less. They don’t really care whether they end up together. And neither do we.